References and their stringifications are unique as long as their data structure have not been released before.

But the deeper problem like others already mentioned, must be stressed out:

Perl has no way to get a reference from it's stringification!

It's a one way street...

Then reversing this hash is like treating a marijuana addict with cocaine.

This whole technique is pointless as long as you don't manually store a lookup-hash to be able to transform key-string to ref.

  DB<107> $aref=[1,2,3]; $lookup{$aref}=$aref
 => [1, 2, 3]

  DB<108> \%lookup
 => { "ARRAY(0x8ffd450)" => [1, 2, 3] }

[download]

Tell your colleague there is no way to use literal arrays here cause the information gets lost.¹

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

PS: as a side note, Python allows other data-types to be keys, but only if they are immutable ... like literal strings are.

update

¹) As long as he doesn't use a tied hash from a fancy CPAN module

In reply to Re: Allocation of anonymous arrays by LanX
in thread Allocation of anonymous arrays by OwlHoot

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